Emira Woods

Bio

Emira Woods is the Global Client Principal for Social Impact Programs at ThoughtWorks, a technology firm commited to social and economic justice. From 2003 to 2014, she was co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, and an expert on U.S. foreign policy with a special emphasis on Africa and the developing world. She has written on a range of issues from debt, trade and development to U.S. military policy. Emira serves on the Board of Directors of Africa Action, Just Associates, Global Justice and the Financial Policy Forum. She is also on the Network Council of Jubilee USA.

Emira completed her undergraduate studies at Columbia University and her graduate studies at Harvard. Prior to joining IPS, she was program manager for the Committee on Development Policy and Practice at InterAction, serving as a principal staff contact for advocacy at the UN, the international financial institutions, USAID and Treasury. Previous to that, she served as a program officer of Oxfam America’s Africa program.

Ms. Woods is a regular commentator on CNN’s Your World Today, BBC’s The World Today (Weekend), and appears regularly on Al Jazeera and Voice of America. She has hosted a WashingtonPost.com online chat and has published pieces in BBC’s Focus on Africa magazine, NAACP’s Crisis magazine as well as the Miami Herald, the Christian Science Monitor, New York Newsday, the Nation, the Baltimore Sun, and the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, among many others.

Ms. Woods is chair of the Board of Africa Action and serves on the advisory committee of the Zimbabwe Alliance as well as the Humanity United/Trustafrica Liberia program. She is also on the Board of Directors of Global Justice and is a member of the Network Council of Jubilee USA.

Latest

Liberia's new president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, will need more than photo-ops with the America's first female African-American secretary of State to lift her country out of the ruins of two decades of war.

How 100% debt cancellation for poor countries--now being debated by wealthy nations--was transformed from an implausible demand into a winning issue, and what barriers lie ahead for the debt relief movement.

The meeting between the UN, the Coalition, and the Iraqi Governing Council on 19 January suggests that the harsh realities of an election year in the U.S. may be making elections more feasible in Iraq.

The latest State Department call for progress in the stalled Ethiopia-Eritrea peace accord--issued this week and coming on the heels of similar expressions of concern by European diplomats last week--is welcome news for those fearing the renewal of war.

In an article posted on the History News Network website in early January, freelance writer Rachel Neuwirth asks, ??Why is it that people are proposing a Middle East peace plan that will make Judea and Samaria Judenrein--the Nazi term for a place with no Jews???